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COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Washington
It has been a learning process for us to enjoy life, to get past that seriousness, and the older we get, the easier we find it to laugh. And we did laugh quite a bit during these interviews, like when Gislean protested our rigid upbringing. "Little German girls are raised to be little good girls. It took a long time to stop being a good girl, and I resent that. One misses a lot in life by being a little good girl. Cinderella was a wimp." With others it was a different kind of laughter, a soft laughter as, together, we tried to fill in the first lines of a song or poem that we half-remembered from childhood....
What serious children we used to be... Raised within the silence, we lived in communities where the adults were always right, where obedience and loyalty were valued above all. (Hegi 1997, 300)
THE THEME OF CHILDHOOD soundmaking has always been an important one for Hildegard Westerkamp, an issue that was evident from her Master's thesis, which uses her own childhood experience of Christmas music as a case study; to her autobiographical Breathing Room III, which includes a song that she used to sing as a child; to an article in Musicworks magazine ("A Child's Ritual," Summer 1987 issue); to many references to the importance and freedom of childhood soundmaking in her oral presentations. She explores this theme most fully in her work for tape and female voice, Moments of Laughter (1988). I think this piece, of all of Westerkamp's work, transgresses the most borders in relation to compositional choices and the thinking behind them, cultural expectations regarding the distinctions between public and private domains, the roles of children and women, and the importance of children's nonverbal communication.
My thinking about the transgressive power of this piece began when I included it in a pilot project about listener responses to Canadian electroacoustic works. Initially, I was surprised by some of the very visceral, and in some cases quite hostile, responses I received in relation to this work. This led me to single it out and continue my analysis, expanding the range of listeners, with the aim of learning more about what was behind these strong reactions.
My own response to the work was at first quite ambivalent. Having undergone a very difficult divorce and custody battle that raised all kinds of questions for me about what standards exist for motherhood and fatherhood in our culture, I am particularly sensitive to stereotyping in musical constructions of motherhood. When I first heard the work, I heard the performer's reading of a poem in the middle of the piece as too sweet. When Westerkamp gave me the score, I realized that this reading tone was not required by the piece, but had been chosen by that particular performer. In addition, I noted that although the piece had been performed only by professional vocalists with ample knowledge of extended vocal techniques (Meg Sheppard, Elise Bedard, and DB Boyko), Westerkamp's instructions in the score made the work accessible to a wider range of performers: for instance, when she asked for a particularly difficult vocal technique, she also included alternatives for less developed performers.
Aware that the work had been performed several times when it was first composed in 1988, but not since, I decided to perform it myself. Even though I had only attended short workshops in extended vocal techniques, I had lots of experience singing with groups and vocalizing with young children. I had enjoyed this interaction with my own children, and continue to enjoy vocal play, particularly with babies and toddlers discovering their vocal range and abilities. I performed the work on radio in Toronto, at a festival of sound art by women in Chicago, and at the Modern Fuel art gallery in Kingston, Ontario. Learning to perform the piece, and practicing it, gave me a much deeper knowledge of it than I would have had otherwise. By the end of the rehearsal period, my response was no longer ambivalent: I am convinced that this work is deeply fascinating and worthy of much more attention than it has received so far.
In this article, I discuss my changing relationship to Moments of Laughter, using several methods of analysis simultaneously: a discussion of the background and context of the piece in terms of feminist psychoanalytic and aesthetic writings; an analysis of the sounds of the piece, inspired by James Tenney's gestalt approach as elaborated in his book Meta+Hodos (1992) as well as by my understanding of the piece as I rehearsed to perform it; and a discussion of listener responses to this piece, based on sessions conducted with high-school and university students as well as at concerts where I performed the work.
THEORETICAL CONTEXT
In the score for Moments of Laughter, Westerkamp refers to the work of French psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva:
Moments of Laughter is dedicated to my daughter Sonja whose voice forms the basis for this piece. Her voice has accompanied mine for many years now and has brought me in touch with an openness of perception, uninhibited expressiveness and physical presence that I had long forgotten.
I have made recordings of her voice since she was born and from the age of four on, she has made her own recordings of stories and songs. Moments of Laughter utilizes these for the tape portion of the piece, tracing musically/acoustically the emergence of the infant's voice from the oceanic state of the womb: from the soundmakings of the baby to the song and language of the child. According to Julia Kristeva, moments of laughter are those moments in infancy and early childhood in which the baby recognizes the "other" as distinct from the "self." They are the first creative moments that speak of recognition of self and place. The child expresses these moments with laughter. (HW: Program note) [1]
Westerkamp analyzes Kristeva's writings about moments of laughter in her Master's thesis.
Kristeva takes us as far back as the moment of separation from the womb. All human beings share this first loss, these first feelings of lack: life as a separation from the "oceanic state" in the womb. All creative process is based on the desire to recreate this state of wholeness. ("Westerkamp 1988, 117)
This theme is an important one for Westerkamp: I have seen variations on it in several of her writings and musings. She associates creative work with attempts to create the sense of total immersion and connectedness that characterizes the womb state. While Westerkamp accepts this desire to return to a state of oceanic immersion as perhaps the strongest creative urge of human beings, it is important to note that others may not share this desire. David Schwarz suggests that envelopment might be experienced as claustrophobic: "On the one hand, envelopment suggests undifferentiated, oceanic, expansive oneness; on the other hand, it suggests being contained, enclosed, and marked off." (1993, 27) For some, immersion could be positive, for some negative; for many, it is likely to be somewhat ambivalent.
Westerkamp continues:
The young baby is still close to this state of wholeness, is still in a relatively balanced situation. Impression and expression, listening and soundmaking happen simultaneously and play a large part in maintaining a sense of wholeness. Desire for such wholeness emerges once the baby recognizes an "other" as distinct from its "self," that is, once the wholeness becomes harder to attain. (Westerkamp 1988, 118)
When Westerkamp uses the term "relatively balanced situation," she is referring to a balance of sound impression and expression, that the baby makes sounds in balance with what she or he hears. However, this is not necessarily an emotionally or politically balanced situation. Kristeva says that during the first three months of life, the baby cries in distress, in what she calls anaclises:
Every cry is, psychologically and projectively, described as a cry of distress, up to and including the first vocalizations, which seem to constitute distress calls, in short: anaclises. The newborn body experiences three months of such anaclitic "facilitations" without reaching a stable condition. (Kristeva 1980, 282, my emphasis)
This sounds like a particularly unbalanced situation, in which the baby cries in distress without knowledge that the distress calls will be answered. The baby is dependent on adults to provide for her. Kristeva describes the role of the adult, particularly the mother, at this time, as "a disturbed reception, a mobile receptacle, which fashions itself on the invocation" (Kristeva 1980, 282). Paradoxically, the mother is expected to empathize, feeling a "surge of anguish" (Kristeva 1980, 282) and thus to understand the child's distress, yet at the same time to be able to break with this period of "primary narcissism" and allow the child to move on to the next phase, diatrophy "so that, with the advent of autoeroticism, the door is finally open to a relationship with the object" (Kristeva 1980, 282).
Kristeva says that during the anaclitic period of the first three months, the baby begins to experience discreteness through.
The breast, given and withdrawn; lamplight capturing the gaze; intermittent sounds of voice, of music--all these meet with anaclisis ... hold it, and thus inhibit and absorb it.... At that point, breast, light, and sound become a there: a place, a spot, a marker. The effect, which is dramatic, is no longer quiet but laughter. (Kristeva 1980, 283)
Westerkamp describes this as a balance of impression (hearing the sounds, seeing the lamplight) and expression (through the sound of laughter). She notes that Kristeva's approach is different from that of theorists such as Deleuze, who describe the recognition of separateness as a violence (Westerkamp 1988, 119). The moment of recognition of another, for Kristeva, is not a moment of angst, of existential loneliness, but of laughter, an expression of joy that someone, some other, is here to...
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